Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Plight of the Lemur: A Movie

By Erik L. Olsen September 7, 2011 8:18 amSeptember 7, 2011 8:18 am

Lemurs are in trouble. The cute wide-eyed primates have been threatened for decades, but their situation has recently worsened. Over the last five years, political instability and corruption in Madagascar, their only native country, has led to extensive deforestation and habitat destruction, even in officially protected areas.

Some estimates place the current loss of Madagascar’s forest cover at almost 90 percent. What’s left has come under increasing pressure from armed gangs of criminal loggers.

While hundreds of lemur species call Madagascar home, the silky sifaka (Propithecus candidus), a timid white fluffy variety, is at most risk of extinction. Estimates on the remaining number of silkys, known as the “angels of the forest” for their white fur and tree-hopping acrobatic abilities, range from 300 to 2,000. The silky is listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as one of the world’s 25 most endangered primates.
The silky’s plight is documented in an online documentary called “Trouble in Lemur Land.” The film follows an American primatologist named Eric Patel, who is trying to save the silky or to at least learn as much as possible about the animal before it goes extinct.

In the film, Mr. Patel ventures to Marojejy National Park, a 148,387-acre area of jungle with rugged mountainous terrain. The park was designated a World Heritage site in 2007 and made the list of World Heritage in Danger in 2010.

Mr. Patel, reached at his home in Davis, Calif., says he has spent three to eight months a year since 2000 in Madagascar while working toward his Ph.D. in biological psychology at Cornell. His efforts to understand the silky sifaka, he says, have brought him insights into the lemur’s communication system, social behavior and diet.

For example, he has seen male lemurs gouge the bark of trees and then rub their chest glands on the marks they make. They do not eat the bark, Mr. Patel says, but the behavior is likely an effort by males to prolong their own scent in an area to attract females.

He has also collected and analyzed hundreds of audio recordings of their vocalizations. “We’ve found a lot of individual and sex differences in the fine grained structure of the sounds they produce,” he said. The differences between males and females are particularly interesting because males and females are about equal in body size.

His fieldwork has also enabled him to gather information about illegal logging that is not otherwise available to environmental groups or agencies that monitor the problem.

“We’re in a position to get intelligence on the ground, to see what is being cut illegally in protected areas,” he said. “I send along my reports on illegal cutting to organizations like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

The film features remarkable scenes not only of the lemurs, all cuddly, but of the criminal loggers who hack down rosewood trees with crude axes and lug out the one-ton logs by hand. Removal of the rosewood trees is harmful enough, but once felled, logs are dragged for miles over the forest floor, wreaking more havoc on the fragile environment.

Mr. Patel says that stopping illegal logging in Madagascar will be impossible until the government stabilizes and some measure of accountability is put in place.

“The problem now is that the government people themselves are organizing and profiting from the problem,” he said. “It’s about money.”

As Barry Bearak, then the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times, wrote last year, the highly profitable Madagascan rosewood is prized for its unusual reddish hue and hardness. A growing appetite for the wood in China, where it is used for furniture and musical instruments, led to a 25-fold increase in illegal rosewood logging in Madagascar last year.

Rosewood, which is also harvested in Mexico, Brazil, India and Africa, is widely used in the manufacture of guitars. American guitar manufacturers say that they have stopped using illegal Madagascar rosewood in their instruments, but the world of illicit wood can be confusing.

On Aug. 24, the Gibson guitar company was raided by agents from the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, who seized pallets of wood, digital files and guitars from Gibson’s facilities in Nashville and Memphis. The agency suspects that the company was using illegally imported wood, including ebony and rosewood, from India, a claim that the company denies.

Gibson’s chairman and chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company, saying that the wood seized by the government was provided by “a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier.” The Forest Stewardship Council is a global nongovernmental organization that certifies forest products are harvested according to specific sustainable guidelines.

Gibson was also raided in 2009, when the government seized guitars and fingerboard blanks made of ebony from Madagascar. Ebony, like rosewood, is considered a precious hardwood, and trade in the wood from protected areas like national parks is banned under a 2008 amendment to the Lacey Act.

After the 2009 raid, Gibson issued a statement saying that the company had obtained sworn statements and documents from the Madagascar government that show “that the wood seized in 2009 was legally exported under Madagascar law and that no law has been violated.” No federal charges were filed after the 2009 raid, but the case is said to be ongoing.

Mr. Patel said that it was hard to untangle where the wood comes from. Others agree.

“Let’s be blunt here: there’s fundamental governance issues in Madagascar,” said Richard Donovan, senior vice president for the Rainforest Alliance, an environmental group. “There is zero question, where you have poor governance you have high illegality.”

Because of corruption in Madagascar, Mr. Donovan said, some wood is permitted through the system and then perceived as legal when it is not. But since there is no rosewood in Madagascar outside protected areas, any rosewood coming from that country would be considered illegal by the United States.

Mr. Patel said the real issue today was exports to China, which make up the vast bulk of the purchases of ill-gotten Madagascan rosewood. Until China changes its laws on imports of rare wood, he suggests, the future of his precious lemurs will continue to be in doubt.

Robin Hammond for The New York TimesA black-and-white ruffed lemur in Andasibe-Mantadia National Park in Madagascar.

What's Next

About

How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, our reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers.